Portable devices such as the ubiquitous flash drives have become commonplace in today's fast-paced culture, replacing their aging floppy disk ancestors. Their ease of use and large storage capacity, combined with their small size and price, make them an ideal tool for retrieving and transporting data from one system to another. Many of these portable devices are also known as USB (universal serial bus) drives because they have a USB plug for connecting with a USB port on a personal computer, laptop, or personal digital assistant. Referring to FIG. 1 there is shown an illustration of an exemplary flash drive 100. The flash drive 100 is generally nothing more than a rewritable memory chip and a standard USB plug housed in a plastic case the size of a thumb (hence the moniker “thumb drive”). Accessing data from the flash drive 100 on a laptop requires not much more than plugging the USB connector 102 of the flash drive 100 into a USB port in a laptop.
Unfortunately, this convenience has created problems due to the ease with which data from a flash drive can become lost or fall into the wrong hands. Many organizations have sought to curb these security risks by adopting policies regarding the use of flash drives. Although these security policies were seen as a step in the right direction, their impotence was brought to light in October of 2006 when a contract employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory took home a flash drive containing classified government information, in violation of lab policy. Also in 2006, stolen U.S. military flash drives containing data about military operations and soldiers were discovered at an Afghan street market in Bagram, Afghanistan.
These and other reports of flash drive security risks have driven some organizations to ban their use altogether. Information technology (IT) managers disable the USB ports on the company computers so that the flash drives cannot be connected. This may seem too extreme for some organizations, so another solution was developed—biometric flash drives which authenticate the user of the flash drive through biometrics. A biometric is any specific and uniquely identifiable physical human characteristic. Biometric flash drives operate by employing a fingerprint scanner on the surface of the drive. The user must swipe his finger over the scanner to gain access to the device.
These flash drives adequately address the problem of restricting access to one person, but they have drawbacks. Firstly, they are much more expensive than regular flash drives and this presents a problem to customers accustomed to buying quantities of cheap flash drives for different uses. Secondly, the biometric device does not prevent the removal of data from a secured location, such as a government building. There is nothing to stop someone from purchasing a biometric flash drive, configuring it to only accept that person's fingerprint, and then steal data just as in the Los Alamos scenario.
Therefore, there is a need for a secure portable storage device to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the known art.